Stars In Your Eyes
by elderflowersandwine
Summary: Stars, you think, are the most beautiful things out there. You'd be right.


Stars, you think, are the most beautiful things out there.

You dream about them constantly, endless balls of flame that exist so far away from you all you can see are pinpricks of light.

Shifting waves of gas, flame and radiation.

 _God_ , you'd love to touch one. Unfortunately, to get that close you would be instantly vaporized. Burned up like your dad's toast in the morning. Reduced to charcoal in a fraction of a second, obliterated in another.

But you continue to dream. You dream of being wrapped up in nebulas and having space dust pervading your nose, mouth and eyes. You know you wouldn't be able to see the nebula while floating inside of it, but you imagine the glistening colors surrounding you. The holiness of the birthplace of stars leaves you breathless, even if it is a happenstance of elements, a jumble of possibility, and accident that stars are formed from.

 _These will only ever be dreams_ , you think. You'd never be able to get close to a star. Never.

Then you die. In your parents' portal you are burnt alive, cremated, you have never felt so much pain. Electricity licks around from your toes to your eyes and you black out. Who could stand so much pain? Its worse that any accident you've ever had and your brain short-circuits again and again and again.

You awake, delirious with sparks arcing from you into the ground. You see the horrified faces of those you love and think, _so this is the afterlife_. But they call out for you and rush for you and somehow, miraculously, you survived. You are _alive_.

Only half alive though. Half of you is still hopelessly dead. When you figure that out you scour every inch of yourself for necrosis or some other dead flesh, fearful of rotting. But no, you got the best half of being dead – the ghost half. You could _fly_. You could pass _through_ solid objects. How that worked was more suited to Tucker's science types.

It was like a game to you, at first. The world seemed to stretch on endlessly, open to you forever. When you tired of the world? Maybe you could leave, shoot into open space and fly for millennia and finally see other planets and stars and lose yourself in the magic of it all.

Then you remember your friends, your family, those who you keep close to yourself, and you mourn because who could ever want a life without them? And them you worry, because what if they die, and you live on? Forever missing them. What happens if your living half dies? Do you go full ghost forever? Will it ever die? What if you lose your ghost half and are stuck with living a mundane, domestic life? When you finally express these fears to your friends and they say, _we'll cross this bridge when we get to it._ And its back to teasing and jokes and everything is okay for a while.

But then high school is over. Everyone in your year moves on, Jazz is in college and everyone you know is applying and leaving. Tucker is accepted into some hotshot college and though he's torn, he has to leave. Sam fights to stay, but her mother forces her to go. You are left alone. After four years of fighting instead of studying, you are left in the dust. Your parents pressure you to apply for community college and you go, getting some bullshit degree in something inconsequential.

Of course your friends come back, but it's never the same, the easy camaradie of childhood never returns. You embitter and push them away. Your snappy remarks stop coming and your foes only halfheartedly fight you. The years fly by and you still stay the same. You run away at 22 because you still haven't grown much from 14 and questions would be asked. Danny Fenton leaves for good, and Danny Phantom fights in secret.

It's the biggest scandal of the past 8 years – Danny Phantom abandoned Amity Park. Though you still watch over the town, you don't fervently protect it. It's as though no one cares. No one comes looking for you. Even more years pass. You missed your parent's funerals and last time you checked, Jazz had children. You don't know where Tucker and Sam went and don't particularly care. Everything sinks into a monotone and you cease truly to live.

You spend several years drifting through towns and forests, half lost to bitterness, half lost to sorrow, entirely desolate. You were wandering through a cemetery; scoffing and the mounds of dirt and kicking in the dust when a name you had almost forgotten caught your eye. _Tucker Foley._

 _No way, no fucking way,_ you think, but there it stood, engraved in the stone as surely as you were half ghost. Your blood ran cold, fear shot through your heart. You backed away, frightened and suddenly feeling more alone than you ever had. You knew you were being foolish when you ran away, but _this_ , this was a slap in the face. This was a consequence you hadn't even fully comprehended – that the most important people in your life would die without knowing where you were. You flinched, imagining they would live their lives and die with your selfishness still keeping them awake. You turned around and fled, not looking at the names on the tombstones, scared of the names you would find next.

Deep in the forest, where you could lay in the long grass of a meadow, surrounded by trees, you tore yourself apart. Letting emotion out for the first time in the better part of a century, you torch the trees, raze the clearing to the ground and break down at the seams. How could you _allow_ this to happen? Regret burned in your throat and you knew you had to make it right. You had to go back and face your mistakes. So you did, crawling and scraping the ground, drained and sore.

The next day was spent furiously looking at the names, looking for the one you feared and loved the most. Under a beech tree, high on a hill, you found her. Her stone was already crumbling and you touched it with trembling, reverent hands, tracing the letters of her name. ' _Loving Daughter'_ and _'She Put The Rights of Everyone Else Before Her'_ the only epitaphs etched into the rock _._

You didn't leave that haunt for a very long time, raw eyes staring at the ground as though she would rise up. For all you knew, she would.

You may have never touched a sun, but to you, she lit up the entire world. She was your sun. She was the light that kept you going even when you could not see it. How could you have allowed her light to be snuffed out? How could you have dared to be so selfish? Here you are, too little, too late, weeping at the grave of a person you should have spent your life with.

Maybe you could allow yourself to be a little more selfish. Its not as though she would mind. You allowed yourself to sink through the ground, intangible, and looked at the wooden box holding what was left of the person you loved more than yourself. _Kind of poetic,_ you thought, _to return to stardust with you_. With a final breath, you released your hold on intangibility and suddenly you _were suffocating, lungs filled with dirt, brain cavity stuffed with mud, and then, and then_

 _nothing._


End file.
